Paul Franz: Inspired conflations
Private and impersonal in T. S. Eliot before The Waste Land
This essay comes to you from Paul Franz’s Substack, Ashes and Sparks, where he writes about literature and film, and shares original poems, stories, and personal essays. We’re excited to feature it ahead of his upcoming Interintellect salon, What the Thunder Said: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Part 5, taking place on August 20 at 7pm EST.
The piece explores one of the poem’s recurring tensions: its strange mixture of esoteric, scholarly references and equally opaque fragments from Eliot’s personal life. Here, Paul revisits Eliot’s claim that poetry “is an escape from personality”, and shows how it connects with Eliot’s idea that “only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.”
To continue the conversation and learn more from Paul, register for the series finale: What the Thunder Said: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Part 5. As always, newcomers are warmly welcome at any session, including the upcoming events tonight, August 6, and August 12.
T. S. Eliot did not describe his poetry as “lyric,” nor did he employ the term as a catch-all for non-narrative, non-dramatic poetry centered on the individual voice. On the infrequent occasions when he speaks of “lyrics,” he tends to mean short, typically stanzaic poems, with a pronounced musical element.1 However, from earlier studies that questioned modernism’s claim to have broken with nineteenth-century poetics, to more recent forays into biography inaugurated by Ronald Schuchard’s proposal to “resurrect the depersonalized” voice in Eliot’s “acutely personal poems,” many critics have claimed Eliot as a lyric poet despite himself.2 But a lyric poet in what sense?3
In recent years, two schools of thought have been particularly influential within English-language scholarship on the lyric.4 One, the comparative framework put forward by Jonathan Culler, regards lyric as an ancient poetic form that persists to the present day. The distinctiveness of lyric, for Culler, is exemplified above all in the prominence it gives to the trope of apostrophe, a figure of “extravagant” discourse that both foregrounds the act and power of enunciation and, in its “turning away” (apo-strophe) from the “empirical listener,” performs a radical detachment from context—including time, place, language, and medium.5
In contrast, the new lyric studies, a subfield of so-called historical poetics associated with the work of Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, treat genres as strongly determined by synchronic “reading communities” and “lyrical reading” as the practice that constitutes this genre.6 For the new lyric studies it is not any particular trope, but rather print mediation and its associated modes of reading that abet an “abstraction” from formerly rich contexts of production and circulation.7 By flattening the reception contexts of particular genres such as “epistles and hymns, ballads and elegies, drinking songs and odes,” “lyrical reading,” on this account, introduces a new conception of the poetic text as offering intimacy with a purportedly universal subject.8 Such reading practices, originating in the eighteenth century and consolidated in the twentieth by pedagogy and academic criticism, produce lyric through “lyricization.”
The study of Eliot will not resolve these disputes, nor will lyric theory definitively resolve whether Eliot “is” or “is not” a lyric poet, as this is not its aim.9 What setting Eliot’s early verse within the context of lyric theory can do, however, is shed light on one of its basic disagreements: over the meaning and status of “reading” itself. That practice, for both schools, is intimately linked to changing historical conceptions of the lyric “speaker,” a figure that has (for obvious reasons) long been irresistible to interpreters of Eliot. Yet the two schools do not have the same stake in distinguishing between moments in its development.
For the new lyric studies, the romantic-expressivist model of lyric as the “overheard” speech of the poet and the New Critical model of lyric as the speech of a fictional “speaker” are both legible as “stages” of lyricization.10 For Culler, however, it is focus on the fictional speaker, in particular, that privileges the “prosaic, novelizing” act of interpretation over the apprehension of lyric as a linguistic “event.”11 Against interpretive models centered on “voice,” Culler proposes a performative and ritualistic model of lyric centered upon effects of “voicing,” such as rhyme, meter, apostrophe, and refrains. Instead of being a fictive text to be “read,” lyric becomes, in Culler’s account, an “extravagant” discourse that is in principle nonfictional.
Culler’s resistance to defining lyric on the basis of interpretive “reading” has some prima facie plausibility for the study of Eliot, who frequently asserted that poetry is an art of effects, in which any final understanding must begin with “that thrill of excitement from our first reading of a work of creative literature which we do not understand” (Prose6 480).12 Culler’s proposal that lyric be construed as “epideictic,” the classical rhetorical term for discourses of value, of praise and blame, offers a particularly suggestive model for Eliot’s quatrain poems of 1920, which influential commentators have associated with “satire.”13 If scholars have seemed reluctant to discuss these poems—which conspicuously feature rhyme, apostrophe, and priamel, among other “lyric structures”—as part of Eliot’s early investment in lyric, it is testament to the idealizations that undergird much scholarship in this field, which largely remains committed to either a celebratory view of lyric as affirming universal values, or to its critique on the same basis. And yet, Eliot’s poetics also reveal the limits of describing modern lyric in purely “ritualistic” terms.
These limits lie not just in the poems’ persistent investment in problems of subjectivity, but in how this investment qualifies their treatment of the ritual forms themselves. If, as Hugh Kenner argued, Eliot dealt in “effects,” the fact that these are “scrupulously concocted out of the expressive gestures of what a reader whose taste has been educated in the nineteenth-century classics takes poetry to be,” marks them as different from their source gestures.14 Aware of the potential difficulties posed by “modern poetry,” Culler maintains that “reactions against the lyric tradition also gain meaning from that tradition.”15 As “gain meaning” suggests, however, his principled distinction between hermeneutics and poetics can be hard to sustain.16 When the features of a genre are present but travestied, can the recent poem be taken as a neutral witness for the genre’s persistence? Or, in Eliot’s terms: is there a distinction between an instance of a genre and its “conscious use”?17 By ironizing the ritualized lyric of enunciation (albeit partly because of its association with the lyric of expression), Eliot reintroduced the lyric of “lyrical reading” in a vestigial and newly enigmatic form.
Our examination of Eliot’s poems will accordingly lend some support to Culler’s effort to displace the “speaker” as the focal point of lyric analysis—despite or because of the fact that Eliot’s best-known early poem constructed an explicitly fictive persona. It is now well known that the result of Eliot’s poetic renunciations is not the fully realized “impersonality” that his would-be critical successors enshrined as an ideal. Then again, recent biographical scholarship, in becoming reflexively skeptical of impersonality, may have given up too much. One contribution that lyric theory can make to the study of Eliot is the recovery of the tension between ritualistic and readerly modes of apprehension, as it is enacted by Eliot’s poems.18 Eliot’s early poems do not so much eliminate as displace the “self” of expressive lyric, yielding what might be called expressivism without a speaker.19 By disarticulating the self and the literary forms that traditionally represented it, Eliot reintroduced both under a new guise.
This tension between ritualistic and readerly lyric can be illustrated by a set of brief, stanzaic poems that Eliot appended to the manuscript of The Waste Land when he sent it to John Quinn on 23 October, 1922, together with the notebook later published as Inventions of the March Hare (Poems1 582-4). Alongside “The Death of Saint Narcissus” and four poems later modified and incorporated into the published Waste Land, Eliot included four additional poems taking their titles from lyric subgenres: “Song,” “Exequy,” “Dirge,” and “Elegy” (Poems1 555). With the exception of “Elegy” (included because it was written on the back of “Dirge”), this second group of poems, which Eliot would later refer to as “those Waste Land lyrics,” were originally composed as interludes between the major sections of that long poem (Poems1 555, 553-6). None is a straightforward member of its titular genre. “Song,” an imagistic etude, anticipates the Tiresias episode in The Waste Land, while “Dirge,” a macabre exercise in antisemitism, and “Exequy,” whose “suburban” riff on the “stop, traveler” motif imagines its speaker’s posthumous apotheosis as a “god of love,” are most readily legible as parodies.20
“Elegy” is a more complicated case. Its speaker, a composite of the Amintor of The Maid’s Tragedy and the protagonist of Poe’s Ligeia, has lost a female beloved (Poems1 1186-7) whom he tells us he would have “mourned / […] / Were’t not for dreams: a dream restores / The always inconvenient dead” (Poems1 284). After two stanzas recounting the grisly dream-vision of his “injured bride,” the poem gives way to a fresh counterfactual, itself interrupted by apostrophe:
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On a literal reading of Culler, nothing could be more lyric than this sequence of poetic moves. Because apostrophe “presupposes an animate listener,” banishing the dead is performatively self-contradictory: addressing the “injured bride” summons her into presence.21 If one wished to “fictionalize” the poem in a manner Culler discourages, one might find such self-contradiction enacting the psychology of guilt—perhaps embodied by those “flames of anger and desire” with which God pursues the speaker at the poem’s close (Poems1 285). And yet, I suspect few readers will experience the poem in quite this way. The bluntly expressed wish that the dead cease haunting the living sends up the expectations of a genre, elegy, that the poem’s archaic lyric language, with its apostrophes and use of the pronoun “thy,” implies is outdated. Rather than being a straightforward instance of its genre, “Elegy” parodies elegy and its own lyric gestures—even if, like its speaker, it finds that trying to dispense with them also keeps them in play.
The apparently standalone “Elegy” and the other “Waste Land lyrics” recapitulate an ambivalence about lyric that had been the driving force of much of Eliot’s earlier poetics. For all their restlessness and discontinuity, the poems in the March Hare notebook and Prufrock and Other Observations, by privileging liminal moments of solitude and revelation (the street at dawn, the stairs just before entering a party) that are menaced by the impending “human voices” of sociability, engage with typically “lyric” themes.22 For Helen Vendler, such early experiments amount to a series of efforts at constructing a voice with which the author can safely “affiliate” himself—a task she sees resolved, paradoxically, in the transparent persona of “Prufrock,” “a strange lyric, pretending to be a dramatic monologue.”23 Notably, however, Vendler finds the moment when this pretense becomes most transparent—that is, when the “affiliation” between Eliot and “Prufrock” is strongest—in what she calls the poem’s “two internal lyrics,” the two passages of stanzaic verse beginning “For I have known them all already, known them all” and “And would it have been worth it, after all” (Poems1, 6, 8).24 If so, the effect clearly depends upon superimposing two different senses of “lyric”: the ritualistic (foregrounding “voicing,” via stanzas and refrains) and the readerly (inviting intimacy with the poem’s “voice”). This same association is one that Eliot’s other early poems typically regard as problematic.
“La Figlia Che Piange” illustrates both the ongoing salience of the expressive subject as a problem for Eliot’s poems and its link with the ritualized structures and motifs of stanzaic lyric. Composed of three irregularly rhyming stanzas, the poem begins like a quintessential Cullerian lyric, with an apostrophe to a female beloved and an incipient refrain:
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Indeed, Culler’s account may be uniquely poised to describe the lyricality of a poem whose succeeding stanzas disarticulate its initial voice, shifting first to a third-person vantage point, before settling upon a new “I” whom it implies to be the chastened, ironical version of the speaker of the first stanza, thus effecting a minimal overall coherence (Poems1 28). And yet, the very energy with which the poem seeks to disarticulate its speaker suggests that, for Eliot, the connection between lyric and subjectivity, between “voicing” and “voice,” together with the expectation that the latter might be read as the voice of the poet, remained an active one, to be actively resisted.
Eliot’s later insistence that “La Figlia Che Piange” was not based on experience, but on “an Egyptian carving in Italy which the poet never saw,” is thus not merely redundant (Poems1 451). The issue is not just that, rather than disarticulating its speaker’s consciousness, the poem might be seen as dramatizing his motivated evasions; instead, by the very act of marking the speech as fictional, by laying bare its constructedness, the poem invited contemplation of a still more recessed subjectivity underlying it—that of the poet. Already, then, in a minor poem like “La Figlia Che Piange,” we find paradoxical intimations of what Charles Altieri has called, in Eliot, “a new immediacy, a new literalness, and a new abstract intimacy for poetry.”25 Such immediacy’s afterlife in later Anglo-American poetry, Altieri suggested, would not be consummate impersonality, but confessionalism, for which Eliot’s poems provided, in fact, the conditions of possibility. By taking apart its fiction, even as it retained the armature of ritualized lyric, the poem invited readers to contemplate new principles of coherence. The experience of the poet would come, in however elusive a way, to suggest itself as that ground.
To be sure, some of Eliot’s early poems seem to depart from such concerns altogether. The abrupt and discordant poems Eliot published in 1920 in England under the title Ara Vos Prec, and in the United States as Poems, with their arch literary and theological allusion and their reliance on antisemitic and other caricatures, can seem, at best, a refinement of the spirit of the earlier “Ballade de la Grosse Lulu” and “The Triumph of Bullshit.” Once again, however, the very depth of their antagonism to expressive interiority attests to its continuing salience as a problem. “Sweeney Erect,” for instance, can be seen as a satire upon “overhearing” as a mode of intimate disclosure, the nineteenth-century model of the relationship of lyric utterance to audience still implicit in Eliot’s later account of the “First Voice” of poetry as “the poet talking to himself, or to nobody” (Prose7 825). Presenting “Sweeney addressed full length to shave / Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,” the poem juxtaposes the “shriek” of Sweeney’s female companion with the reaction it provokes from the “overhearing” witnesses:
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Whatever the “ladies of the corridor” profess to fear this “hysteria” being “misunderstood” as (scholarly conjecture ranges from unspecified “violence” to “orgasm”26), the poem burlesques the notion that either option implicates a profound interiority.
Yet the Eliot of Ara Vos Prec does not altogether dismiss concern with interiority, and, with it, the prospect of being “misunderstood.” The forbiddingly obscure “Ode,” called by one critic Eliot’s “nadir,” represents in this, as in other respects, a limit case of his early exploration of lyric.27 The only one of Eliot’s printed poems never collected in his lifetime, it joins the tripartite structure of Greek choral ode to an extreme rhetoric of sexual violence and severe depersonalization. Declaring “Misunderstood / The accents of the now retired / Profession of the calamus” (Poems1 280), its opening strophe conjoins poetry, sexuality, dysfunction, and incomprehension; these themes return in the antistrophe, which, in a typically Eliotic contrast, sets a quintessential instance of ceremonial lyric—the chorus from Catullus’s poem 61, a wedding hymn—against what Anthony Julius characterizes as “a disastrous honeymoon, and the humiliating, desperate coupling of virgins”:28
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“Ode” has no discernible speaker (thus either ironizing or radicalizing its “choral” template), nor are its increasingly asyndotic clauses readily legible as speech acts. So much, it seems, for the readerly lyric—unless, of course, like Julius, we interpret these absences dynamically. On this view, the poem’s “intrusive use of the third person singular” becomes “a defensive, self-concealing gesture,” exemplary of how “[t]he poem is trapped between a refusal to admit responsibility for the blood, and an inability to deny it.”29 Curiously, Julius omits from his persuasive reading an element that supports it—the poem’s epigraph, slightly misquoted from Coriolanus: “To you particularly, and to all the Volscians / Great hurt and mischief” (Poems1 280). In context, I suggest, this functions as misogynistic code: for “Volscians,” read “women.” Recasting the play’s violence as sex and its own sex as violence, a brittle masculinity here regains its composure by recasting (unintended) infliction of pain on one woman as deliberate aggression against all women. Yet by supplying the second person addressee (“you”) otherwise missing from the poem, the epigraph also hints at the otherwise absent first-person pronoun; that is, in the deleted preceding clauses from Shakespeare: “My name is Caius Marcius, who hath done.”30 Without becoming the voice of a “speaker,” the poem thus reveals itself as oriented by a subject, albeit one that (via deletion) is literally outside it.
Does surmise about that subjectivity amount to “lyrical reading”?31 Consider Eliot’s response to an inquiry from I. A. Richards about an echo of one of his own poems in Coriolan. Though Eliot—whose fascination with Coriolanus, in “Ode” and elsewhere, suggests various forms of investment, both personal and political32—acknowledged “the allusions” as “perfectly deliberate,” and that it “was my intention that the reader should recognize them” (Poems1 818), he declined to elucidate them. He reminded Richards that it was “a theory of mine” that “if the reader knows too much about the crude material in the author’s mind, his own reactions may tend to become at best a kind of feeble image of the author’s feelings, whereas a good poem should have a potentiality of evoking feelings and associations in the reader of which the author is wholly ignorant” (Letters5 731-2; Poems1 818-9). In fact, Eliot’s appeal to his readers’ “feelings and associations” embodies a characteristic ambivalence.33 Where Jackson and Prins have described “lyrical reading” as replacing the “referents” shared among members of a community by public meanings, Eliot here imagines something like the reverse: public meanings (which include allusions to a notionally common “culture”34) are what evoke each reader’s private associations. The convergence between such “feelings and associations” and those of the author is not excluded as a possibility, but left indeterminate. Nevertheless, the “potentiality” of the poem to evoke readers’ private feelings allowed them to infer, if not specify, its derivation from the author’s own.
The uncertainty of how to locate subjectivity in his poems was, in other words, something that Eliot encouraged. The crucial documents remain 1919’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and 1921’s “The Metaphysical Poets.” Taken together, these essays, like the poems, do not so much eliminate as displace the “self” as a locus of poetic interest. The distinction between the “man who suffers and the mind which creates” would be more easily sustained if Eliot did not place such emphasis on the pathos in creation, which is a “continual self-sacrifice” and not altogether “tranquil” (Prose2 109, 108, 111). Eliot’s “sacrifice of himself” to “something better” is not the theatricalization of personality that we find in, for example, Yeats’s declaration that the poet “is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.”35 In a sense, it was just that “bundle of accident and incoherence” that Eliot’s “new wholes” preserved.36 The literary correlate of the theatricalized self is the lyric “speaker.” Eliot’s “sacrifice,” with the signal exception of “Prufrock,” tended not so much to replace that figure with the fictive “persona” as to displace it into an implication of the poems’ artistry.
The early Eliot’s conflicted engagement with the expressive lyric, occasional assimilation of his work to a dramatic, fictive model, and prevailing disinclination to do so can each be read as moments in a skepticism about the value of the self; and yet, as all readers of Eliot will recall: “only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” When Eliot attributes to Dostoevsky a gift “for utilizing his weaknesses; so that epilepsy and hysteria cease to be the defects of an individual,” he finds such weaknesses redeemed, not in a perfected impersonality, but as “the entrance to a genuine and personal universe” (Prose2 413). For Eliot, however, “utilize” here starts to mean something different than merely being subordinated toward some end. Poetic form, the modernist poet’s ever more self-consciously employed instrument, estranges self-expression from itself.37 Lyric is both the object of such estrangement and its result
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